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book: making it
Making It
Four - Having It All - Is It Possible? - 93
Now that we’ve talked about negotiating your way to success, you might ask yourself: “What am I negotiating for? What is it I want out of life?”
Of course, if you’re like me you’ll answer: “Everything” - and why shouldn’t you have it all? How many pieces of life can you juggle: yourself, a relationship, a career, childre?
When I grew up I looked around, there were very few women who had broken out of the traditioinal female mold. The only ones who had were movied stars. We all looked to them with a feeling of envy, because through their own abilities they had attained fame, money, power, and prestige - things that were out of the reach of ordinary women.
When I interviewed Gloria Swanson, Joan Fontaine, and Kitty Kelly, biographer of Elizabeth Taylor, I was fascinated to hear a similar theme in all their stories. As they worked their way through numerous marriages - four, five, six - each movie star would talk of giving it all up, settling down with a man and living the fantasy they had always had of “real” happiness: a home with a white picket fence, a man, two kids and a dog. Talk about destroyed illusions! All the time we were wishing to be in their very glamourous shoes making love to Paul Newman, Stewart Granger and Richard Burton in technicolor, they, in fact were looking at those “ordinary” women who they thought had picture-book happiness.
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